Andrew Dedesko is a backend software engineer with 13 years of experience. He became very interested in metrics and alerting after being woken up countless nights while on call. Outside of work, Andrew likes cycling, camping, making s’mores, and pancakes. Adriano Mariani is a software engineer with three years of experience specializing in backend software development. Currently, Adriano is working at Kijiji on SEO-related initiatives.

If you are part of an engineering team, monitoring the performance of your CI/CD pipelines is a high priority. With the SquaredUp GitHub plugin you can view key metrics for your GitHub repos and workflows all within a single pane of glass. We also have plugins for Jira, Circle CI, Azure DevOps and more. So even if you are using many different tools you can still get an end to end view of your processes.

Synthetic monitoring is a critical practice to proactively track the health and performance of web applications. By simulating user interactions, this approach helps developers identify issues before they impact real users. One of the simplest forms of synthetic monitoring is known as a ping check, which verifies whether an endpoint is reachable. In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at what a ping check is, and then walk through how to perform one using Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring.

As an Azure admin, it is of critical importance that you keep an eye on how much cost you are incurring running your workloads in the cloud. You also want to have sight of any deployed resources that are not contributing to business and accumulating cost over time. Using a dedicated Azure plugin, SquaredUp dashboards will help you understand your Azure costs across services, resources, locations and apps – so you can keep tabs on how much you're spending and identify opportunities to save costs.

So you had a great day playing with really awesome new tech, solving big business challenges, and feeling like you really nailed it. Then you wake up the next day to an alert from Azure telling you you've blown your monthly budget and its only the first week of the month. We've all been there... right? Using any cloud service comes with a cost, but for most services the budget risk is low. Cost calculated daily isn't a problem when usage is predictable, but not everything works like that.

Organizations around the world use Microsoft Azure to power their businesses. The cloud computing platform includes hundreds of products and services organizations can use to build and manage applications, but monitoring those environments can often feel like navigating a maze of fragmented data, tools, and processes.

Grafana’s extensibility has always been one of the keys to its success. It comes with a wide range of data sources that allow you to query your data no matter where it lives, visualizations to help you quickly make sense of that data, and apps that can provide complete observability solutions, all in a single package.

Logs play a critical role in observability, but they do come with their own challenges. Grafana Loki, our horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant log aggregation system, addresses these challenges head on, giving you an open source tool that’s both cost effective and easy to operate.

One of the most interesting stories in the dashboarding space over the past year or so has been the emergence of the Perses project. This is an open source project which not only provides a platform for dashboard creation, but also sets itself the very ambitious target of defining a common standard for dashboards as code. As a SquaredUp user, you may be wondering why we might want to talk about a potentially competing technology. Well, obviously, being SquaredUp, dashboards are in our DNA.